Womenstake, NWLC's Blog

Last week, HHS released its third annual report outlining its accomplishments over the past year and its objectives for the coming year for improving the health of LGBT individuals, families, and communities. LGBT women in particular have reason to celebrate these accomplishments, but all women benefit from initiatives that seek to end discrimination and improve health outcomes and health care access.

For example, HHS regulations and guidance requiring equal visitation rights at hospitals, nursing homes, and other facilities that receive Medicare or Medicaid helps not only LGBT families but also anyone who has a family joined by bonds of affection and affinity rather than legal coupled status. Likewise, the ACA’s nondiscrimination protection (section 1557) provides important protections against discrimination for women and LGBT people alike.  HHS’s focuses in the upcoming year—implementing the ACA and the June 2013 Supreme Court decision striking down a part of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)—have important gains for women, LGBT people, and individuals living with HIV/AIDS.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the monthly jobs data for July today and the numbers tell the story of a recovery that is just too slow.

There was good news in July as adult women’s unemployment rate matched its recovery-era low at 6.5 percent. However, this rate is still 1.5 times as high as the unemployment rate for adult women when the recession began in December 2007. Additionally – adult African-American women, adult Hispanic women, and single moms all still have unemployment rates several percentage points above this level.

July also proved to be a less-than-impressive month on the jobs front. The economy added 162,000 jobs in July, 117,000 of which were gained by women. However, adding 162,000 jobs each month is far below what we need to get back to pre-recession employment levels including absorbing the growth in the population. In fact, here’s a (sad) fact for the day: at this pace, it will take nearly 11 years, until 2024, to close the jobs gap, according to estimates by the Hamilton Project.

On July 30, George Miller, the senior Democratic member of the House Education and Workforce Committee, introduced the Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act, or POWADA, which would restore vital civil rights protections for older workers by reversing the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Gross v. FBL Financial. POWADA reestablishes that once a victim shows discrimination was a “motivating factor” behind a decision, the burden is properly on the employer to show it complied with the law.

The Gross decision made it nearly impossible to prove age discrimination by requiring that victims prove that age was not only a factor in an employer’s decision but was the decisive factor (this is also known as “but-for causation” meaning that but-for the age discrimination, the employer would have made a different decision). The Gross decision has had wide-reaching effects: just this year, the Supreme Court applied the higher standard of proof to claims of retaliation in University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar (applying but-for causation test to claims of retaliation under Title VII), and, as in Gross, expressed skepticism at the intelligence of jurors and lower court judges in Vance v. Ball State University (restricting the definition of ‘supervisor’ under Title VII).